S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chernobyl

New patch is nice, of course my mods borked something. Now to spend an hour or two figuring out which ones, lol. Such is life being early to the zone. Worth it though, this game is AWESOME. Finally a good, gritty, modern FPS. I don’t hate third person RPG, but FPS is my original love and we are sorely lacking options in the modern era.

I'd also like to see the return of regular single player FPS games. Things like Crysis, that aren't extremely narrow and scripted like CoD. The few FPS games that do come out tend to have survival elements to them like Metro and now STALKER 2. I really enjoyed Metro Exodus and the original STALKER games, but I do want to play a new FPS that is a shooter first. Last games I can think of were the Wolfenstien and Doom games.
 
Still can't play because binding keys still have double binds and can't change it. can't walk backwards still because my dude looks down at the same time and its annoying as fuck.

Also how do I fix this weird grainy sheen on everything?

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The SIRCAA missions feel like they were designed by a Half-Life fan - sciency exosuits, ethically dubious experiments, surprise momentary teleportation. Had fun doing those.

I'd also like to see the return of regular single player FPS games. Things like Crysis, that aren't extremely narrow and scripted like CoD. The few FPS games that do come out tend to have survival elements to them like Metro and now STALKER 2. I really enjoyed Metro Exodus and the original STALKER games, but I do want to play a new FPS that is a shooter first. Last games I can think of were the Wolfenstien and Doom games.
There have been a small number of plain-old shooters recently. Prodeus, Trepang², and Boltgun are the ones I have enjoyed most.
 
The SIRCAA missions feel like they were designed by a Half-Life fan - sciency exosuits, ethically dubious experiments, surprise momentary teleportation. Had fun doing those.
I honestly thought the exact same thing! I was saying to myself how this reminds me of half-life lol.
 
Still can't play because binding keys still have double binds and can't change it. can't walk backwards still because my dude looks down at the same time and its annoying as fuck.

Also how do I fix this weird grainy sheen on everything?

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Not sure about the grainy sheen, but the key bindings definitely an issue. Assume that they will address on future patch.
 
Still can't play because binding keys still have double binds and can't change it. can't walk backwards still because my dude looks down at the same time and its annoying as fuck.






Same here hoping for a fix soon makes it unplayable for me. Cursed lefties and their need for different controls.
 
This might be the first game I can feel the low fps on my 3080 at 3840x1080.

It looks good, so I can't tell if its just poorly optimized or not.
Changing the graphical settings doesn't seem to make a lot of difference for me, so I'm leaning towards unoptimized. Given how bad performance is in town, it makes me think they are basically doing no occlusion culling or something, since every building interior seems to be active/rendering at all times even when you're not in there and can't see it.
 
I'd also like to see the return of regular single player FPS games. Things like Crysis, that aren't extremely narrow and scripted like CoD. The few FPS games that do come out tend to have survival elements to them like Metro and now STALKER 2. I really enjoyed Metro Exodus and the original STALKER games, but I do want to play a new FPS that is a shooter first. Last games I can think of were the Wolfenstien and Doom games.
The Wolfenstein and Doom games are still scripted linear shooters like COD, especially the former. The new Doom games are more like arena shooters with some limited exploration available in the corridors in between them. You're still being herded from point A to point B. Why you don't see more generic immersive shooters like Crysis anymore is because they don't sell all that well by comparison. I've heard it called the "ImmSim Curse" before.
Changing the graphical settings doesn't seem to make a lot of difference for me, so I'm leaning towards unoptimized. Given how bad performance is in town, it makes me think they are basically doing no occlusion culling or something, since every building interior seems to be active/rendering at all times even when you're not in there and can't see it.
The performance tanks in bases and settlements because of the NPCs, not the graphics. This is an issue with other games and AI entities that have heavily scripted routines, it's just not typically as bad as it is in this game. It could be that their scripts were not optimized, cleaned up, or not multithreaded at all. The game could also be running multiple scripts for every single AI entity at the same time. The performance related to the AI could be why out in the open world that entities only spawn and become active when the player is within a certain distance of them. They wanted to make sure that, at least when it comes to combat situations, the player isn't being bogged down.
 
The Wolfenstein and Doom games are still scripted linear shooters like COD, especially the former. The new Doom games are more like arena shooters with some limited exploration available in the corridors in between them. You're still being herded from point A to point B. Why you don't see more generic immersive shooters like Crysis anymore is because they don't sell all that well by comparison. I've heard it called the "ImmSim Curse" before.

The performance tanks in bases and settlements because of the NPCs, not the graphics. This is an issue with other games and AI entities that have heavily scripted routines, it's just not typically as bad as it is in this game. It could be that their scripts were not optimized, cleaned up, or not multithreaded at all. The game could also be running multiple scripts for every single AI entity at the same time. The performance related to the AI could be why out in the open world that entities only spawn and become active when the player is within a certain distance of them. They wanted to make sure that, at least when it comes to combat situations, the player isn't being bogged down.
Hi Armenius. If i like fps shooters like Doom,this game will be for me?
 
So I wasn't able to play for a couple of days... because as I got stronger I started venturing further and further out.

Anyways, I found a tornado... and said there HAS to be something good in that. I spent two days of playtime figuring out how to survive the damn thing... Then I finally got the doohikie that was in it. The doohikie was pretty awesome, but then I started crashing... I didn't connect the dots between the doohikie and emissions, but it was game-breaking. I actually played much a full day enjoying the doohikie before an emission hit. Then crash, crash, crash.

If you see a tornado in a later zone, don't get the doohikie until they fix it. The doohikie is awesome, for example, I frolicked amongst the gravitational anomalies like the nun from the Sound of Music because they did absolutely no damage to me (protip: you can actually use gravitational anomalies to climb up and move about the map with some RNG excitement and eventual death, but it's lots of fun).

I also ran into a mutant that looked like the flying cow from avatar that took more ammo than taking down an aircraft carrier with a Red Rider BB Gun... it was a ton of fun, but I died eleventy billion times fighting it.

Still enjoying the hell out of this game despite the doohikie - it's pretty much the only disruptive thing I've really run into so I've been lucky.

I had to go back to an earlier save, but once they fix the doohikie I'm gonna go back and get it.
 
Hi Armenius. If i like fps shooters like Doom,this game will be for me?

This game is better than Doom I don't think you'll have any problem with it unless you choose Veteran. I only have about two hours clocked.


I don't mean original Doom or Quake just the Modern games.
 
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The Wolfenstein and Doom games are still scripted linear shooters like COD, especially the former.

The main difference with Wolfenstein (recent reboots) and CoD is they do offer a few different path ways. Though it is still largely scripted. Black Ops 6 does have a few open ended missions where you can choose objectives and approaches. Those are actually decent though it isn't quite as flexible as something like Crysis.

Why you don't see more generic immersive shooters like Crysis anymore is because they don't sell all that well by comparison. I've heard it called the "ImmSim Curse" before.

I don't understand that. Those are the best kinds of shooters, open enough to give you some leeway and tactics, but not endless running and chores.


Regarding STALKER 2, is the quick save a single slot or are there multiple quick save slots like Cyberpunk?
 
The main difference with Wolfenstein (recent reboots) and CoD is they do offer a few different path ways. Though it is still largely scripted. Black Ops 6 does have a few open ended missions where you can choose objectives and approaches. Those are actually decent though it isn't quite as flexible as something like Crysis.



I don't understand that. Those are the best kinds of shooters, open enough to give you some leeway and tactics, but not endless running and chores.


Regarding STALKER 2, is the quick save a single slot or are there multiple quick save slots like Cyberpunk?
TBH, as i get older, I much appreciate the nature of games that are basically just letting me play through a set story. Doom Eternal, Tomb Raider, all linear, but I absolutely love those games. That being said, I still very much enjoy the openness of games like CP2077 or Stalker as well... really just depends on how well the story is told.
 
any timeline for the release of the hardware ray tracing patch?…hopefully it won’t be a year or more
 
any timeline for the release of the hardware ray tracing patch?…hopefully it won’t be a year or more

Based on my understanding its their priority since they were not able to make it into release date:

"three major features will be introduced to STALKER 2 after launch. The first is a technical one, hardware ray tracing, which Lead Producer Slava Lukyanenka told me is unlikely to be ready for November 20."

Link:

https://wccftech.com/stalker-2-is-g...ss-platform-mods-and-multiplayer-post-launch/
 
TBH, as i get older, I much appreciate the nature of games that are basically just letting me play through a set story. Doom Eternal, Tomb Raider, all linear, but I absolutely love those games. That being said, I still very much enjoy the openness of games like CP2077 or Stalker as well... really just depends on how well the story is told.

I agree. Most open world games suck because the developers can't design good open worlds. The original STALKER games weren't open world but they weren't linear and struck a good balance between natural exploration, some set pieces, and some emergent gameplay. Crysis is similar, as are the recent Deus Ex games. I wish there were more games like that. STALKER 2 opens it up more of course, though it does not seem like it suffers from it unlike most Ubisoft-style open worlds.

There have been a small number of plain-old shooters recently. Prodeus, Trepang², and Boltgun are the ones I have enjoyed most.

Trepang2 looks interesting, may have to play that while I wait out another few patches for STALKER 2. I somehow missed this game entirely. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.
 
I believe I've had as many as 4 at a time, can't remember.

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Good. This came in handy in Cyberpunk when I had progression stopping bugs once. Loaded back 3 quick saves, fixed the issue. Manual saves are also important but sometimes when you get into the gameplay opening a menu to manual save is something I forget to do frequently because it hurts immersion. Love to see PC features are actually implemented.
 
Good. This came in handy in Cyberpunk when I had progression stopping bugs once. Loaded back 3 quick saves, fixed the issue. Manual saves are also important but sometimes when you get into the gameplay opening a menu to manual save is something I forget to do frequently because it hurts immersion. Love to see PC features are actually implemented.
F5 often, you'll save yourself a lot of grief.
 
No video or IGN alternative, unfortunately. During an interview after a screening of the "making of" movie for the game at BAFTA developers from GSC Game World pretty much confirm that A-Life 2.0 is causing performance issues and why they needed to shrink the sphere of detection where the AI would become active. That also caused a lot of bugs.

https://www.ign.com/articles/stalke...s-removed-from-the-games-description-on-steam

“This system to work properly requires a much larger area for spawn NPCs, and it requires much more memory resources," Ievgen says in English, which isn't his first language. "We were fighting with optimization. To optimize, you have a lot of things that need your resources, and you try to cut things from different directions to properly optimize the game well.

“But to make it work we had to optimize some things, and they make A-Life work in many situations not as it should. Also, we created some bugs not long ago before release with NPCs spawning in the air and dropping back to the bottom. They should actually spawn in the terrain. Why it happened, I don’t know! And also we had some bugs with AI behavior.

“So, all these things connected make it look like it's very broken and not working. But we are now continuing working on the optimization part to bring more resources for the A-Life system, to increase the range where A-Life is actually visualized.

“There are NPCs outside of the range of the player and they are in offline mode. And when the player reaches some distance, they are going to online mode and they pop back up. The distance is dictated by our optimization range, where we stream the real world and not real world with all the collisions. It was tough work, and because of these optimization problems and bugs, it's become broken.”
“For now we committed to players to make it work and it can be done from directions both optimizing, giving more resources to A-Life, fixing bugs, making it work properly, and then putting more efforts to make it more advanced,” Ievgen says.
 
NPCs with brains the reason I like Dark Age of Camelot were the spawns were in a specific location on a linear path but the higher level stuff was more intelligent and made sure you got squashed. Plan on playing the as soon as I'm not tired from work.
 
Hopefully after reinstalling the game Steam doesn't decide to download and execute the patch from my HDD again.
Yeah that is strange, I only had 285GB free on my NVME and it still installed without touching any of my other drives.
 
Two installs because they take me like 30 hours to download. I made a copy of Dragon Age too but and Black Myth due to size.
 
Since today's patch I can't access my inventory without crashing to desktop. Anyone else having this issue? I'll fiddle around with settings and mods but I was wondering if others are seeing more crashes as well.
 
id start there...

Still happening after removing all ~mods. Verified integrity of game files. Set to all low settings. Will continue troubleshooting. Frustrating I set aside 8 hours to play today and spending it looking at the shader compilation screen. :banghead:
 
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